Perfect Soldiers finally gets inside the heads of the 9/11 hijackers.

By John Dicker

With all the books that came after 9/11about the Taliban, the little tiff between Islam and the West, and countless hagiographies of all things Giulianinot a single one concerned the people who did the deed. ~~~image~~~For all of bin Ladens financing...

Sore Winners explores the Bush-era culture of gloating.

By John Dicker

It’s a pity the Bush-bashing book genre is so dominated by screeds that have as much to do with their author’s vanity as they do with politics. Purchasing many of these titles can be more reasonably viewed as an act of political patronage...

The Greatest Story Ever Sold sells the masterful manipulations of the Bush administration.

By John Dicker

Like a lot of brand-name journalists, Frank Rich attracts his share of awe and loathing. Being a “cultural” critic for The New York Times, after all, is enough for an entire demographic to dislike you, if not dismiss you, on partisan principle....

Indiana isn’t famous for cranking out cultural luminaries, though the ones it has sired are as random as anything an iPod might spew. In politics, there’s native socialist son Eugene Debs and, uh, Dan Quayle. In music it’s John Mellencamp...

Joan Didion looks back at her Western roots in Where I Was From.

By John Dicker

The high queen of literary journalism has struck again with what smells and feels like a memoir, but proves to be the sort of rambling medley of reportage, social and personal history that only Joan Didion could pull off.While Didion’s eloquent—and...

A Long Way Gone captures the real story behind African child soldiers.

By John Dicker

Last fall, film critic David Denby gushed in the New Yorker about the just-out-on-DVD Blood Diamond. Set in Sierra Leone during its horrific civil war, the film is a romantic drama about an American journalist (Jennifer Connelly) and a South African diamond...

A Hundred & One Days tells more about the author than it does life in war-torn Iraq.

By John Dicker

Liberation, invasion, occupation—whatever you want to call it, the Iraq war is now 2 years old; contain your ambivalence, please. And with the chaos, bloodshed and occasional glimmers of hope have come more than a few books. At first, the majority...

Tobias Wolff turns to fiction but sticks with class conflict in Old School.

By John Dicker

Sometimes solemn, slightly precocious and perpetually self-eviscerating, the unnamed narrator of Tobias Wolff’s first novel thirsts for anointment into the American literati. But like recent bete noirs of American letters, a lust for unearned greatness...